Obsessions

Life Learning Family posted about obsessions this week. Reading her post gets me thinking about all the fasicinating ways our individual interests have enhanced our collective lives.

We've been through the dinosaur stage -- and because of that, everyone in our house knows how to say "pachycephalosaurus." (Granted, we say it without the English accent!) We all learned about prehistory and fossils and evolution and anatomy and the differences between carnivores and herbivores, and spent many happy hours visiting dinosaur exhibits in both Wisconsin and Arizona.

The boys also, as I've mentioned below, have been through and are re-visiting a YuGiOh obsession. Butterflies were another fascination. We all got interested in the delicate creatures when Boy #2 spent two summers chasing and collecting the critters -- a fascination that led us to hatch our own monarchs...which required us to learn how to identify milkweekd...which led us to correspond with Mexican schoolchildren.

The latest fascinations in our house are:

• Boy #1 -- fishing
• Boy #2 -- coin collecting
• Boy #3 -- making and creating his own cookies
• Boy #4 -- construction equipment and tractors

All of us, in some way, have learned something from each obsession. Thanks to the fishing fascination, I can now identify almost all native Wisconsin freshwater fishes. Coin collecting was a fun way to reinforce United States geography (I found a neat coin map to display that state quarters he was collecting), and we all learned, just the other night, that FDR is the president displayed on the dime. (Did you know that the March of Dimes took its name from FDR's call to contribute dimes to fight polio?)

The cookie making obsession is messy, to say the least, but is teaching me to be more creative in the kitche; not everything, I'm learning, has to come from a recipe.

And as for the construction equipment/tractor obsession...let's just say I'm a little sick of that one. I'm the child of an excavator, for goodness sake! I GREW UP with backhoes and bulldozers in my backyard. Between that kind of exposure and the fact that he is my SECOND child to exhibit a prolonged and very intense fascination with all things equipment (see point #2 on my post, "You Know You Have Boys When"), I am simply tired of reading the same old machine books over and over and over again. I swear, some of those books have logged more days at my house than at the library over the past 10 years!

How about you? What's the latest obsession at your house? And what are YOU learning from your kids?

YuGi Returns

My boys have rediscovered their YuGiOh cards.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with YuGiOh, it's a trading card game, kind of like Pokemon. Each card has a character with attack and defense points, or else is a spell or trap card that can inhibit or enhance the character cards. Players "duel" each other and the object of the game is to win by taking your opponent's life points down to zero.

Personally, I'm glad I could explain that much to you! The game is COMPLEX, and my boys (even my five-year-old) play it way better than I do.

My second son (pictured) is the one who got us into the game. He's always been a collector, and after he saw a friend's cards, he started collecting Yu-Gi-Oh. That led to a world of discovery: YuGiOh books and movies from the library. A YuGiOh computer game. And so, so much more.

Their dad collects football cards, so the boys are well-aware that cards have value.

They spent hours pouring over online sites such as this, researching the value of their cards and inadvertently improving their computer, math, typing, spelling, reading and writing skills. One son would meticulously type in the names of his cards, letter-by-letter, and then record their value on a sheet of paper. All of them mentally tallied life points every time they dueled.

Money skills were involved as well, as each child had to save up and make his own decisions about which packs of cards to buy when. YuGiOh also enhanced their social skills. The boys connected with other boys who played YuGiOh and dueled as often as possible.

But they wanted more; they wanted to enter a REAL YuGiOh tournament! So they went online and researched options. Turns out, a hobby shop half an hour away hosts a tournament every weekend.

We went, and it was WONDERFUL! There's nothing better than seeing a room full of boys (and some girls) of all ages -- ranging from my five-year-old to fathers in their 40s -- actively involved and having fun. These kids were animated. They were excited. They were intense. And I couldn't help wondering -- how many of these boys feel like losers at school? How many of these boys are labeled "slow," "destructive," or "unmotivated?" Because in that room, all I saw was opportunity.

Sometimes, all it takes is the right spark to light a boy's mind on fire. And if that spark comes in the form of a multi-colored trading card, I'm all for it.